CLARKE AND KUBRICK TRIED TO WARN US: ‘Open the Pod Bay Doors, Hal.’ Amazon Locks a Man Out of His Smart Home Over Racism Allegations.

HMM: Why Putin Will Never Agree to De-escalate.

Putin himself has little to gain from stopping the war any time soon, especially if the Ukrainian counteroffensive proves successful. Sure, ending the war would save thousands of lives, significantly relieve the pressure on the Russian economy and society, allow Russia to stabilize its international position, and so on. But for Putin personally, putting a stop to the conflict would be a disaster for his position in Russian domestic politics and history.

No matter how repressive the Russian regime has become, ending the war would inevitably prompt public reflection. There would be many questions about the invasion’s purposes, its high cost, and whether the result justified that cost. Moreover, Putin would have to face those questions in a situation where it would no longer be possible to justify harsher repression by citing the exceptional circumstances of war.

Regardless of how worn-out Russians may be, therefore, Putin will stick to his selective perception of reality, looking for reasons for and ways to further escalate his addictive crusade against the current world order. Putin has not even made any bones about his intentions: His key decisions over the past months—from tightening the military draft system to massively investing in weapons production—clearly indicate that he is bracing his country for a long war. It is hard to see how the upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive could affect these calculations, regardless of how successful it turns out to be.

I’ve written time and again that Ukraine’s biggest weakness is the West’s short attention span — and more than a year later, it’s clear Putin is willing to put that to the test.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump’s Enduring Appeal—He Never Does What Dems Want. “Democrats would have loved to see him show up to the courthouse with a look of panic in his eyes. Instead, he arrived to mini rally and had social plans for the rest of the day.”

IT’S THE SPENDING, STUPID: How Biden’s debt deal paved the way for the next financial mess.

Fitch Ratings, one of three major credit agencies, has already put the U.S. on notice that its top-tier rating could be dented even after President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a deal to suspend the debt limit until 2025.

Now, Fitch says it isn’t convinced that policymakers can set the nation’s finances on a sustainable path because of the polarization roiling U.S. politics, suggesting that a downgrade on Treasury securities could be on the way — the second in U.S. history.
“It’s not just the debt limit,” James McCormack, Fitch Ratings’ managing director and global head of sovereign and supranational ratings, said in an interview. “What we’ve seen in the United States is a steady deterioration in governance.”

Washington has an infinite appetite for spending, no real restraint thanks to the Fed happily monetizing each trillion-dollar-fad-of-the-moment, and near-endless obligations already on the books.

The rot runs so deep that my guess is that each side just hopes not to be the ones behind the wheel when we finally go off the cliff.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Missing Source of the Virus Was a Man. “Even with the cat out of the bag, Forbes notes that, shockingly, laboratories are still performing gain-of-function research on viruses more dangerous than Covid-19. ‘Whatever rationales proponents come up with for this kind of activity — Dr. Anthony Fauci has long been a powerful supporter — enhancing viruses in such ways is a mortal threat to humanity. Accidents are inevitable, yet gain-of-function research is growing with little effective oversight.'”

YOU AREN’T PARANOID: The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens.

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members.

What that report ended up saying constitutes a nightmare scenario for privacy defenders.

“This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”

In the shadow of years of inaction by the US Congress on comprehensive privacy reform, a surveillance state has been quietly growing in the legal system’s cracks. Little deference is paid by prosecutors to the purpose or intent behind limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance activities. More craven interpretations of aging laws are widely used to ignore them. As the framework guarding what privacy Americans do have grows increasingly frail, opportunities abound to split hairs in court over whether such rights are even enjoyed by our digital counterparts.

Read the whole thing.

FLASHBACK: Biden Promised to Use His Power to Prevent Trump From Returning to White House.

FACE, MEET PALM: Twitter can’t become a town square if Elon Musk is in it.

Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino is amped up for Twitter 2.0 and the platform’s potential to finally become the ‘town square’ long ago promised by outgoing CEO Elon Musk. But that will never happen as long as Twitter resembles less of an open forum and more of a live recreation of The Lottery.

Yaccarino, who joined the social media platform last week from NBC/Universal, penned a spirited Twitter thread this week in which she briefly outlined the platform’s goals and potential. On the one hand, I applaud the effort. It’s Yacarrino’s job to set the tone and communicate Twitter’s latest aspirations.

However, her tweets came just a day after Musk once again waded into the debate around transgender issues. And those tweets came fast on the heels of so many others aimed at media, universities, and any number of Musk’s other favorite targets. It wouldn’t matter, I guess, if Musk didn’t have 143 million followers – more, by a significant margin, than any other platform member.

Yaccarino cannot move forward until she addresses Musk’s influence, claims, and penchant for flame-throwing on the platform she now runs.

If Orwell were alive today, he might have to add “Conformity is diversity” to the end of “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

THIS IS ESSENTIALLY A PORN MANDATE FOR MANY PUBLIC SCHOOL LIBRARIES: Illinois Becomes First State to Outlaw Book Bans in Public Schools and Libraries.

CHANGE: Linguists have identified a new English dialect that’s emerging in South Florida.

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: LGBTQ Activists Send Bomb Threats to Target Locations for Betraying Their Community.

Remember, if you decide not to shop at Target, that’s violence. If lefties threaten to blow one up, that’s just speech.

INNOVATION: Russia Taps Power Of Tech Startups For New Kamikaze Drones, Aiming For ‘Cruise Missile For The Price Of A Washing Machine.’

MEGAN FOX: Pride Month Jumps the Shark. “One shouldn’t have to explain that twerking naked in front of children is a disgusting celebration that should be roundly denounced.”

HOW IT STARTED:

Friendly reminder that Lori Lightfoot doesn't want you to celebrate Thanksgiving but had no problem dressing up for Halloween 🤦🏾‍♂️🤡 pic.twitter.com/IrsB3foDhf

— Damani Felder (@TheDamaniFelder) November 23, 2020

How it’s going: Ousted Chicago Mayor Lightfoot to teach Harvard public health course.

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE…: A Canadian Firefighter Sheds Light on the Smoke in the East.

POLL: Opposition to men in women’s sports is on the rise.

69% of Americans believe that athletes should play against athletes of their own sex, regardless of transgender identification.

Only 26% of respondents said that transgender individuals should be allowed to compete with opposite-sex athletes.

This poll shows a considerable change in public opinion in just two years. The same poll conducted by Gallup in 2021 found that 62% of Americans felt that sports should be divided by biological sex.

Americans, gay and straight, have been too tolerant for too long of the “drag Marxists” who have hidden a far-left agenda under a guise of tolerance for queer and trans. Worse, they’ve destroyed the notion of individual rights by conflating them with obvious emotional and mental health issues.

That’s changing.

MEET THE NEW PATRIARCHY: Johns Hopkins University Is Literally Erasing Women to Be More ‘Inclusive.’

THEY’RE PUNISHING THEIR FANS FOR BEING THEIR FANS: Woke Marvel Eliminates The Punisher Due To ‘Problematic’ Conservative Fan Base. “The goal is relatively obvious – To erase competing ideals and viewpoints while saturating the market with only one political vision; a woke vision. It’s called social engineering, and anyone who claims this is not happening in the US today is gaslighting.”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Did A.I. Just Do the Impossible and Reunite The Beatles?

COMMUNISM IS THEFT: Former Samsung exec accused of stealing data to build copycat chip plant in China.

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: WEF Wants to Restrict Car Ownership for Climate Change.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: California’s COVID unemployment reckoning goes national.

Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code For America and former U.S. deputy chief technology officer, writes that the turmoil at California’s Employment Development Department is a prime example of failures that have also plagued other major civic tech efforts, such as the post-Obamacare implosion of healthcare.gov or archaic IT systems at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

“Of all the tech disasters I’ve witnessed and tried to help untangle, the one I’ve come to see as most emblematic of these forces — and the ways we consistently misunderstand them — is the story of California’s unemployment insurance in the first year of the pandemic,” Pahlka writes in the book “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing In the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.”

Three chapters of the book chronicle Pahlka’s time co-leading a “Strike Team” deployed by Newsom in mid-2020, as long benefit delays and outlandish stories of fraud began to dominate headlines. In the months to follow, state officials would find that payments were delayed to some 5 million workers and may have been improperly denied for another 1 million, all while the state lost as much as $32 billion to fraud, according to varied state and industry estimates.

Once you understand that enabling fraud was a primary goal and that proving relief was at best a tertiary concern, everything makes sense.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Pride Month Week Two—We’re Clearly Not Being ‘Phobic’ Enough. “What I meant by today’s headline is that we need to become louder and give the Left more opportunities to call us whatever kind of “-phobe” they have teed up in their unwell brains that day.”

AI FEEDBACK LOOP: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content.

As those following the burgeoning industry and its underlying research know, the data used to train the large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models underpinning products such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney comes initially from human sources — books, articles, photographs and so on — that were created without the help of artificial intelligence.

Now, as more people use AI to produce and publish content, an obvious question arises: What happens as AI-generated content proliferates around the internet, and AI models begin to train on it, instead of on primarily human-generated content?

A group of researchers from the UK and Canada have looked into this very problem and recently published a paper on their work in the open access journal arXiv. What they found is worrisome for current generative AI technology and its future: “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models.”

Garbage in, garbage out — and if this paper is correct, generative AI is turning into the self-licking ice cream cone of garbage generation.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Burisma Founder Who Allegedly Bribed Joe and Hunter Biden Is a Russian Asset. “The US intelligence community has a high degree of confidence in their assessment of Zlochevsky as SVR. This is not a new assessment; the intelligence community under Obama knew this, and Obama was briefed on it. Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland were briefed as well.”